The Municipal Demarcation Board has developed SA Explorer - a powerful, easy-to-use tool that brings geographic information to your desktop. SA Explorer gives you the power to visualize, explore, query and analyze information about the whole of South Africa.

You don't need to know how to create or convert geographic data or connect to complex databases in order to use the SA Explorer. SA Explorer contains all the maps determined by the Municipal Demarcation Board over the past two years and together with a wide variety of geographical, electoral, demographic and other information will allow users to readily obtain information about any area they are interested in.

In no time you'll be working with the data in a completely new way, seeing patterns you couldn't see before, understanding geographic relationships that were previously hidden, gaining new insights.... and achieving new results for you and your business or organization.

The latest version of SA Explorer [v2.0] was launched on Sunday, 4 August 2002 at the IGU conference at the ICC, Durban.

SA Explorer will allow anyone who has access to a computer with a CD drive to be able to create their own maps and find out basic demographic, electoral, political and other information at a ward, municipal, provincial or national level. Using a grant from the Norwegian government, the Board will be providing up to 10000 copies of this CD for free to stakeholders throughout South Africa.

Screenshot of the SA Explorer interface

Using SA Explorer - review the training material. Prepare a 1000 word review of this application.

Description of Range Extension for ArcView® (extracted from their website)

The Home Range Extension (HRE) for ArcView was created by Arthur R. Rodgers and Angus P. Carr, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada

The HRE contains software that extends ArcView to analyze home ranges of animals. The ability to use large data sets and carry out all required home range analyses within a single software environment were our primary reasons for developing the Home Range Extension (HRE) for the ArcView GIS. The program has been written for novice GIS users who already understand basic wildlife telemetry issues and who are familiar with the concept of a "home range". Since the HRE was originally developed for use with LOTEK GPS collars, it has a direct import filter for their data files. The HRE also provides direct import of data from Service Argos DCLS files, dBASE files, or ASCII text files. An important feature of the HRE is the "Moose On A Leash" (MOAL) data animation tool that follows an animal's path as it moves from point to point. Point data can be used to calculate average distance moved between fixes, average elapsed time between fixes, speed of movement, total distance moved in a given period, or home range polygons. The HRE currently includes 2 home range analysis models: minimum convex polygons (MCPs) and kernel methods. Because different computer software programs may produce large differences in home range estimates based on these models, the HRE includes most of the options offered in earlier programs for calculation of estimators and values input for various parameters. There are several different ways to automatically generate %MCPs in the HRE. The HRE includes both fixed and adaptive kernel methods. Both Schoener's index and the Swihart and Slade index are calculated in conjunction with kernel analyses. Determination of habitat types used by an animal is relatively straightforward in a GIS using the geometric intersection of "the habitat" with "the area used by the animal" as described by a polygon resulting from one of the MCP or kernel methods. The user should be able to perform all the analyses of their point data within ArcView and the HRE.

Screenshot of HRE in ArcView

Using ArcView - undertake the tutorial on Home Range Extensions. Once you have completed the tutorial (application and tutorial can be downloaded from the Contents Page of KEWL) you will analyze some other GPS provided at a latter stage. Prepare a 1000 word review of this application.

Print a hard copy and hand in directly to Richard Knight PLUS Email the document electronically to